Retail outlets such as stores, banking branches, gas stations, or like are considered important but costly channels for many retailers to win in the customer-centric marketplace. Generally, retail outlets refer to the places where products can be sold to customers. Retailers are the companies or enterprises, which have many retail outlets. How to configure a retail network is a critical issue for retailers to address, especially in competitive markets. Different factors such as location, store formats, types of customers, etc. have been taken into account when configuring a retail network. Known methodologies, however, deal with those factors in separate models or systems.
For example, to select a new site for establishing a store, the known methodologies first determine new locations, then determine the formats of the new retail outlets. For existing store reconfiguration, the known methodologies first determine the change of locations, then determine the change of formats separately. Existing methodologies also decide on the capacity, target merchandise, and target customer for a given store, separately. The known or existing methodologies only configure the factors in separate systems and furthermore use conventional data, for example, geographic data and population number in the trade area.
Accordingly, it is desirable to have a method and system for jointly and/or simultaneously considering different factors when configuring retail networks. It is also desirable to use novel types of data input when configuring retail networks.